This website is a project to generate a micro-autobiography and share my research interests, such that

Dustin A. Gilbert

Controlling atomic distributions within ionic materials offers the opportunity to tune virtually every property of a material, including magnetic, electronic, thermal, optical, and mechanical properties. Furthermore, the charge on the ions makes them susceptable to electric fields, opening the opportunity to control materials with ultra-low power, voltage-only approaches.

We have demonstrated control of ionic distributions by constructing heterostructures with built-in chemical potential gradient, or through active control using electric fields. Through this control, we induce metal-insulator, magnetic, and even structural transitions.

Web of Science "Highly Cited Paper" (top 1% for Physics for time and field)

Research Directions

Using the above tools and techniques I conduct research on magnetic systems and magnetic materials. Some fields of current interest include magnetic skyrmions, magneto-ionics, and magnetic behavior at interfaces and surfaces. Magnetic skyrmions are topologically protected chiral magnetic structures with interest both to fundamental science and high-density storage and logic devices; magneto-ionics are a class of technologies similar to memristors in which an electric field is used to move ions, and in doing so, control the magnetic ordering; magnetic and electronic properties at surfaces and interfaces can be very different from the bulk properties, as demonstrated by topological insulators, and by probing the properties of these low-dimensional features we expand our understanding of physics and can develop new technologies.

Polarized Neutron Scattering

Utilizing spin polarized neutrons I investigate the magnetic and structural scattering of nanostructured systems. Neutrons are an extremely powerful characterization tool because they are penetrating - giving information about inside materials - and also are intrinsically nano-scale. Neutron scattering is sensitive to magnetic structures and have non-trivial element specific nuclear scattering which gives it a sensitivity to some elements which are otherwise hard to characterize (like oxygen). Sir. Patrick Stewart discusses neutron scattering in the below video.

Nanostructured Magnetic Systems

Conducting experimental research on nanostructured systems including psudo 1-D uniform and multi-layer nanowires, 2-D thin films and patterned arrays, and 3-D dispersed systems; I have investigated exotic domain states (vortex), high anisotropy materials, reversal in abnormal geometric shapes, multi-layer nanowires, ferromagnetic and superparamagnetic nanoparticles, and electrical transport and GMR. I also perform simulations and modeling of magnetic systems

Magnetic skyrmions

Magnetic skyrmions are wrapped spin textures in which the moments form closed, continuous structures. These structures cannot be continuously created or destroyed, giving them non-trivial topological character. Skyrmions have the additional properties that they are frequently very small (<70 nm), and can be driven by relatively small charge currents, making them attractive for next generation magnetic recording and logic technologies.

The challenge in realizing skyrmion technologies has been stabilizing the spin structure at ambient conditions. We have overcome this challenge through nanopattering vortex-state nanodots and imprinting the chiral structure from the dot into a magnetic underlayer.

Expanding on our understanding of the first order reversal curve (FORC) technique - developed from my investigations of magnetic systems - I have investigated hysteretic transitions in other systems, searching for interactions and variations in the intrensic properties.

Two materials grown adjacent to one-another can give rise to trivial interactions which influences the their mutual behavior, but can also give rise to emergent new physics, independent of either layer by itself. This has been previously used to achieve interesting magnetic behavior such as exchange bias, but also can induce magnetism in the adjacent material, such as topological insulators. To probe the weak magnetism at the surfaces and buried interfaces I use polarized neutron reflectometry and XAS